An unsuitable blog for a woman...

August 31, 2015

So far in 2015, I've written 2 novels and 5 short stories. I have one more novel to go by 12/31, another 80,000 words, for a total of ~ 258,900 words, all but 1600 of them about crime. Add 6 blogs/month, and you might see why I'm running out of words.

Please don't be so cruel as to remind that I got what I wished for back in the 90's.

Now, if you don't mind, I'll use other people's words to answer the question Why Do We Love to Write About Crime?

1) The old familiar:

Because All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.— Leo Tolstoy

2) A strange comment from Agatha Christie:

A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no awe, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

Well, not my mother, but are we to believe that all of Christie's work represents mothers' fighting for their children? Hmm, does this mean that even happy families might involve crime?

3) A new one, paraphrasing Michael Connelly in his NYT review of THE WHITES by Richard Price, 2/15/15:

… the crime novel [is] something more than a puzzle and an entertainment; [it is] societal reflection, documentation, and investigation.

August 29, 2015

At midnight Aug 29/30, Camille Minichino will go online and meet 36 students for her Golden Gate University class on “Science, Technology, and Social Change.” She'll be home; they’ll be in Tampa, Indiana, up and down the state of California. The Welcome video is up and ready!

As a salute to the waning summer, here are the links to the posts of our summer spate of guests. Sit back and enjoy the words from a variety of authors who dropped in to visit The LadyKillers these last couple of months!

August 28, 2015

Cross-gender writing is a bit like cross-gender dressing, except that you are not putting on the clothes of someone of the opposite sex, you are putting yourself in that person's heart and mind.

When you're a woman writing in a man's point of view, or vice versa, it's important to get the character's mindset right. Clearly some writers are better at this than others. But really, isn't that true of any kind of characterization? The key is to understand the person you're writing about and the more you have in common with him or her, the easier that becomes. So being of the same sex as your POV character can help. But that is not the only similarity you might draw upon. We are all individuals with many traits, and gender isn't the only thing that defines either the writer or the person he or she is writing about.

Which brings me to a panel I moderated at a mystery conference some years ago. The authors on the panel all had protagonists who were gay or transsexual. One of them -- and I regret that I can't recall his name -- wrote about a pair of cops, one of whom was a middle-aged redneck white guy, a high school graduate from a lower middle-class background, decidedly heterosexual. His partner was a young, gay, black man who had an Ivy League education and a cultured upbringing.

The panel got off to a good start with an interesting discussion. Then an audience member, too impatient to wait for the Q&A, yelled out this question to the author I just described: "Hey you, what gives you the right to write about blacks or gays when you aren't either of those things?"

For a moment everyone -- panelists, audience, even the (ahem) moderator -- fell silent. The challenge hovered in the air.

Then the author gave a thoughtful response. He explained that although he was Caucasian and straight, he really had more in common with the black gay cop than the other one. They had grown up in the same city, attended the same university, and had the same political views. He'd had more trouble getting under the skin of the other character, despite their having such basic traits as race and sexual orientation in common.

The other panelists followed up with their thoughts. The consensus was that the task for authors is to find the points of commonality that will allow us to connect with all of our characters, and that we have the right to write about any character we can present with sympathy, authenticity, and understanding.

While we deviated quite a ways from the stated panel topic, the discussion was lively and interesting, and we all felt that it was, in some hard-to-define way, important. Later I heard from a number of people who were there that they felt it was the best panel of the conference.

I can't speak for all writers of fiction, but for me, one of the reasons for undertaking the always-daunting task of writing a novel is to increase my own understanding of people -- people who are like me and people who are not. I learn so much from trying to create characters who are fully rounded individuals, not defined by one trait or another and to make them come alive on the page. I know I don't always succeed, but I always find the effort to be worthwhile. And I claim the right to write about anyone who walks into my imagination and says, "I'm an important part of the story you're trying to tell."

August 27, 2015

When I started my first book in 2009--well, let me frame that: my first real book--I had a rather impressive grade school/junior high literary career that consisted of novels about time-traveling orphans and full-length Christopher Pike rip-offs--my narrator was a woman and the book would have been gently categorized as romance. I say gently because my idea of romance is a lot less moonlight and flowers and a lot more pizza and fishing rods.

But, I digress.

I wrote that book from the point of view of a woman and it was about women's issues and it was a romance because that's what women were supposed to write about. Right? Gender bending (a female writing a male narrator and or vice versa) was absolutely happening in fiction (hadn't we all been stunned to find out the author of She's Come Undone was a man?) but it was saved for those real authors, those "statement" authors that were, in my imagination, literary men who wore tweed and corduroy with patches on the elbows. It was not something done by novice authors (despite winning the Most Impressive Vocabulary award for my fifth-grade tome, Time Travelers, I still entered the writing world as a green beginner). And, I uncharacteristically accepted that.

For a while.

As my books got darker and I honed my craft, I decided I wanted more of a challenge. I was fifteen books into my career and I wanted to flex my muscles and give myself something to agonize over and struggle with because apparently, I'm a closet masochist. I approached my editor with an idea I loved--a dual narrative with both a female and male protag--and she told my agent, "The idea is brilliant. I'm just not sure that Hannah is the author to write it. "

That was all the encouragement I needed. (Because in addition to a masochist, I'm also a hard-headed, "I know you are but what am I?"-maturity level jerk).

I started writing. I overthought it and in an effort to make my male narrator stand out from his female counterpart, I edged on the side of, "Me Tarzan, you Jane." I trashed the whole thing and started over.

I read male authors with male narrators and a few male-to-female/female-to-male author narratives. I watched men. I realized that my fiance will wait until the last possible moment (read: not a single clean plate in the house) to unload the dishwasher and my male best friends will always eat the last Buffalo wing even if it clearly belongs to me (women will push the last piece of anything to another woman who will shave off a sliver and pass it back saying, "no, you take that last bite"). I realized that if I didn't stop scrutinizing the sexes, I would find the whole human race futile and start writing about my cats (also futile).

I trashed everything that came from those learnings. There's a murderer on the loose in the book; no one cares who truly deserved the last wing!

I tossed out everything--all the advice, all the, "this is what you have to do"--and just wrote. I let the story fuel me and the characters fleshed themselves out, male and female. I tortured them and riddled them with angst and terror and confusion and realized it's not my sex that matters--it wasn't even theirs. It was the weight of the story, the development of the characters themselves. The Escape went to press, and released, and less than thirty days later, it went back to press again since that first print run had already sold out.

As yet, no one has been caught up in the female-writing-a-male conundrum. People have mentioned the characters themselves and the way they seemed, "well thought out," and "distinct," but as of yet, no "You write like a girl" comments, nothing trying to cripple me and keep me in a pretty little box. No, that was all me and my perception of the world's expectations. Funny how for a feminist, I thought what was keeping from writing what I wanted--with a voice that I wanted--was everyone else, when it was really just me. I'll be meeting my male friends tonight for our every Thursday stint at the pub and yes, I'll be eating that last Buffalo wing.

August 26, 2015

The classic “write what you know” has a whole new meaning when writing cross gender. The fiction writer must inhabit the minds, emotions, and bodies of people whose essential makeup and experiences are quite different from their own. Write what you know has its limits, and many of us write to experience something of what we don’t know. Most men prefer to keep their feelings under lock and key. Women are far more likely to share them with their BFF. You need to get inside your character’s head to be true to whom they are and be consistent, rather than letting gender define what happens next.

I believe a writer writes from their own experiences, regardless of the gender of their characters. But the further you stray from your own experience, the more research you’ll want to do. Some points to consider are background, religion, education, beliefs, and how you and your character were brought up. The idea that one sex cannot know the inner workings of the other well enough to narrate a novel, seems illogical. Such logic can backfire, validating prejudice about gender and abilities—women aren’t good at math, they’re too emotional, or men are brutes, they don’t listen, and they don’t ask for directions. I almost deleted the last two. My lips are sealed, at least for this blog.

Do you think about the author when reading gender-crossing works? Arthur Golden wrote in a woman’s voice so convincingly in his 1997 debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, that a NY Times book critic said, “the first-time novelist Arthur Golden not only defies that old piece of creative-writing class advice ‘write what you know,’ but does so with impunity and panache as well.” He continued with, “What is striking about the novel is Mr. Golden’s creation of an utterly convincing narrator, a woman who is a traditional product of Japan’s archaic gender relations and a spirited picaresque heroine, a sort of demure Moll Flanders.” Golden successfully crossed three of the boundaries.

I had Memoirs of a Geisha on my bookshelf for years but, alas, I’ve either given it away or donated it. Now I wish I still had it. I’d love to read it again, but wonder if I’d pay too much attention to cross gender writing and not enjoy of the story as much. I researched the author and found he did a lot of research to put himself in a position where he could begin to know enough about that imagined other person to make that leap of gender-crossing writing. He lived in Japan for a while and interviewed a Geisha, which was almost unheard of. He tossed many drafts and spent several years getting it right. What's it like, sitting there at the computer keyboard, as a white male, trying to put yourself into that other skin? Or for a woman writing from the male point of view?

August 24, 2015

Please welcome today's honored guest, award-winning author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (www.chelseaquinnyarbro.net), who has published more than ninety books in many genres. She is best known for the acclaimed St. Germain cycle of vampire novels, the first of which, Hotel Transylvania, was named by the Horror Writers Association as one of the six most significant vampire novels of the 20th century. She writes with equal ease about male and female protagonists and from male and female points of view.

The next books in her pipeline include a reissue of her western, The Law in Charity, and Haunting Investigation, first in a new series featuring Chesterton Holte, gentleman haunt.

For the last forty-seven years I've been a professional writer; during that time, I've worked on eight series, running from trilogies to the Saint-Germain Cycle, of which I am now working on the twenty-eighth book, and the twenty-sixth novel in the series. When I began my career, the relationship of editor to writer was different than it is at present; editors tended to be more collegial with their writers, in large part because they had more clout in the publishing pecking-order than is the case now, for editors had the right to license a book up to a certain advance limit — it varied from publisher to publisher — without the editorial committee or the promotion department having a say in the editor's selections. My first novel sale, which came after seven years of selling short stories, was the first book in the Charles Moon series, Ogilvie Tallant & Moon, and among other things, there was a clause in the contract that required that I get the publisher's approval before I did any promotion on my own. That included autograph parties and signings at conventions. Goodness, how that has changed.

The second Charles Moon, Music When Sweet Voices Die, had a somewhat rougher go than the first, in large part because I had a change of editors about halfway through, and ended up with someone who had very little interest in Charlie Moon, or my work in general. That series ended up in limbo for more than a decade, and when I resumed it, I had a more supportive editor, but the power of the promotional department had grown, so that rather than using my whole name on the two new books — and the reprints of the first two — the promo people insisted that I use C. Q. Yarbro, and make all the titles two words long. Those two rather arbitrary conditions were deal-breakers. So I agreed, annoyed, but having rent to pay. When it came to publicity, the publisher did the bare minimum, and was reluctant to ship books to book-dealers at science fiction conventions because the Charles Moon series are mysteries, and at the time, the common wisdom was that readers never crossed genre lines.

Between phase 1 and phase 2 of the Charlie Moon series, I began the Saint-Germain Cycle with Hotel Transylvania, which was originally bought by NAL, and NAL sold reverse rights to St. Martin's Press, and St. Martin's sold book club rights to the Doubleday roster: Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, Science Fiction Bookclub, and Doubleday Bookclub. This pattern was repeated for the next four books in the series. Publicity was marginal, largely because no promotional department knew what genre the books were in, and declined to promote them in more than one market. My relationship with my initial editor at NAL was very fond of the series, and generally understood the focus of the works. My first editor at St. Martin's was enthusiastic, and my second one there was actively supportive, and the promotion was minimal. But when I was in the middle of the fifth book, my original editor left and my work was handed off to an editor who was looking for bodice-rippers, not a humanistic vampire, and I stopped working on that series rather than change the tone of what I was doing. So the series went into limbo for eight years, until an editor at Tor asked me if I'd like to do some more. At the time, Saint-Germain was not actively in my mind, and I said probably not, but I could do some books about Olivia. And that was how the Olivia trilogy came into being.

There was more general support for the series at Tor, where editors tended to have a better slot on the food chain than was and is the case at a few other publishers, but publicity was only slightly above minimal. My editor worked on positioning the books on the list in what were considered good slots for horror, but things like autograph parties and interviews were left up to the bookstores and me to set up.

It was roughly twenty to twenty-five years ago that the gulf between midlist and leads began to widen, eventually becoming uncrossable. If a book was licensed that was seen to be midlist, the publicity was routine and minor, and the print-run was small. Where publishers had been willing to increase print-runs from book to book, and to provide increasing amounts of publicity before the fault cracked, if you started out midlist — as the vast majority of writers do — you now were stuck there unless you had an important film sale or television show, in which case, everything changed. Publishers dropped the basic print-runs for all books but leads, and limited promotion accordingly. Editors were laden with more and more work, and spent less and less time working with writers. To make matters worse, the market was shrinking as more and more publishers merged, and although the imprints remained, the number of editors did not, and in almost all large commercial presses, the promotional department now had veto powers over books. A number of my colleagues, who had been able to make a reasonable living, no longer were able to do so, and in many instances, had to depend on small presses for publication. It was pretty dreary for a while.

The advent of e-publishing changed the dynamics of publishing dramatically, for now there was a market for the backlist, and although print-and-paper book sales were slumping, e-sales were on the upswing. E-presses sprang up like spring daisies. Writers began to have more say on such things as cover designs, the appearance of the books themselves. For the most part, writers were expected to do their own publicity, but the field of online promotion was expanding to meet the burgeoning need. Writers with lagging careers could begin to revive them.

Now that I am starting what I hope will be another series, since I am dealing with a new publisher, the first book is receiving more publicity than anything I have ever done before. The publisher is using my on-line publicist, I am working with my favorite editor, and the ARCs are going out to far more reviewers than in the past. So hold a good thought for Haunting Investigation: a Chesterton Holte, gentleman haunt mystery; which will be out in a few months, and for Living Spectres, the second Chesterton Holte mystery, which I hope to complete by the end of the year. It is lovely to think that writers, editors, and publishers may still have a flourishing place in the entertainment world.

August 22, 2015

We have another guest poster lined up for your reading pleasure! Join us Monday with Cheslea Quinn Yarbro, an author who has sold over eighty books in a wide spectrum of genres, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews.

Camille Minichino is putting finishing touches on MATRIMONY IN MINIATURE, the 9th book in the Miniature Mysteries, before sending it off to editorland and sends her thanks to all her loyal beta readers!

Staci McLaughlin is excited that her kids are starting school on Monday, allowing her to focus on the sixth Blossom Valley mystery.

Ann Parker has reached page 82 of a very drafty first draft. (Serious editing required!) Goal: 100 pages by September 1...

Michael A. Black,Margaret Lucke, and Mysti Berry are finishing up an enlightening weekend at Writers Police Academy, and send their greetings from Appleton, Wisconsin!

August 21, 2015

Please welcome today's honored guest, Megan Carney. Megan is an author, geek, and amateur photographer living in the Twin Cities. She has ten years of experience in the field of computer security.

Her previous short story publications include: 'Flighty Youth' in the Raritan, 'Modern Mayhem' in the Wayfarer, 'Swing By Close' in the Wayfarer, 'Directions' in the Bell Tower. 'Swing By Close' and 'Directions' both won first prize in the fiction sections of that issue. The Christian Science Monitor dubbed her self-published photography book, 'Signs of My Cities' as having "youthful zest."

Her debut thriller, Sarina, Sweetheart, was a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Publisher's Weekly describes it as "[a] narrative with a dark humor that complements its fast pace and high stakes."

You can find out more about Megan, her writings, photography, and geekery at megancarney.com. She also tweets as @SometimesAthena, though not as often as the social media gods say you should.

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In prime time television, computer attacks are heralded by blinking red lights and audible alarms. Then there’s some clumsily written dialogue about breached firewalls, and the scene cuts to someone typing on a keyboard in a dark room where the only light comes from the glow of a computer screen. Eventually, the audience discovers this brilliant, evil hacker single-handedly compromised the main frame using a zero-day attack. In one day. While wearing a hoodie. Hackers always wear hoodies.

I’m here to save you from this trope.

Let’s start with the task of detecting computer attacks. The truth is any computer connected to the Internet is being attacked in small ways all the time. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, legitimate ad networks host malicious ads, good websites end up hosting bad code, emails with evil attachments still make it through spam filters, and various global bad actors are scanning for weaknesses all the time. This is the first reason it is ridiculous when a computer attack triggers blinking red lights. If that were actually true, the blinking red lights would be on all the time.

The second reason it is ridiculous is that determining whether an attack represents a small annoyance or full-scale emergency requires a human analyst of some sort. The real story starts this way: someone looks at a screen and says ‘hey, that looks odd.’ Then they do some work. Then they do some more work. Then they talk to someone else. Then maybe, if their suspicions pan out, the news spreads up through various layers of management until someone decides what to do about the intrusion. If you’re lucky. In some cases, if it’s not costing the business too much money, they throw up their hands and do nothing. Comforting, isn’t it?

Okay, now about firewalls. I could write an entire blog post on how to correctly use the term firewall in fiction. In fact, I have. So let’s not rehash that. The real problem here is that most attacks, even the big ones that lead to massive data breaches, start with pedestrian tactics. The Target breach started with a malicious email. The criminals used that email to get someone to install a program that allowed them to get someone’s username and password. That username and password gave them access to an internal system on Target’s network. That was then used as a jumping off point for infecting the registers. Firewalls were never part of the equation.

And the criminals didn’t even have to write the code that infected the registers. The lone hacker single-handedly taking down a large network is a rare occurrence. And by rare, I mean vanishingly rare. The reality is that there’s a thriving black market for cybercriminals. Do you want to buy time on computers that someone else has already taken over for you? You can do that. Do you want to buy an exploit kit that will automate infecting large numbers of computers? You can do that too. Last year, the going price for the code that will mutate your evil program so it’s undetectable by 90% of anti-virus programs was two hundred dollars.

Okay. Now we can talk about zero-day attacks. They’re one of the coolest things in my field. A zero-day attack is an attack that has no available patch. That means your machine will be vulnerable to it, no matter what you do. Super scary, right? Sounds great for fiction. I hate to be the one to tell you this… but zero-day attacks are not the first choice for a criminal or even a spy agency. What’s really scary is that many computers, even at government agencies, can be compromised without resorting to fancy zero-day attacks. Patching reliably, on a large scale, is difficult. Most organizations fail. Your antagonist probably doesn’t need a zero-day attack to succeed, and wouldn’t try it first.

Why not? Zero-day attacks are powerful because they’re secret. The more they’re used, the less secret they are. Eventually, someone submits a sample to an anti-virus company. Or the breach is discovered and the email attachment gets analyzed, and then boom, your fancy zero-day is no longer your ace-in-the-hole. Zero-day attacks also raise the profile of an attacker. Sophisticated criminals don’t want to show their hand if they don’t have to. Better to use a common weapon, so their victims aren’t alerted to their presence. Zero-day attacks are typically reserved for high value targets when other attacks won’t work.

We should also talk about timing. Most attacks worthy of a novel take time. The target is studied. Scanned. Researched. And then, when the attacker has determined the best approach, compromised.

As for hoodies? Well, I can’t really fight that one. Computer geeks of all stripes tend to own hoodies. Course, most non-computer geeks do too. You can keep the hoodie.

August 20, 2015

Modern crimes are really no different than ancient ones. The difference is the methods with which these crimes are committed.

Instead of a snake oil salesman rolling into town with his wagon full of cure-all elixirs, late-night television commercials now hawk these wares. Never mind that these miracle drugs haven’t been approved by the FDA. Who reads the fine print on the bottom of the screen anyway?

Rather than traveling from town to town to try and rope unsuspecting investors into suspicious land deals, scammers can now sit in the comfort of their own homes (or the basement of Russian office buildings) and send e-mails to millions of people in the hopes that at least some of them are willing to take a chance on untold riches. But I have to ask myself, how many Nigerian princes could possibly need my assistance? What are the odds that two of my Facebook friends are both being jailed in foreign countries and in need of bail money at the same time?

Back in the day, if someone wanted to rob a bank, they would have to break into a physical building with their six shooters at the ready, or else rob the stagecoach as it was transferring the bags of money. Now, a savvy coder can hack into a bank’s computer system and electronically transfer the funds to an offshore account in the Caymans while never being in any physical danger (until the Feds break down their door, of course). The job is much easier, but the end result is the same: the thief has a bunch of money that doesn’t belong to them.

Likewise, while the methods of murder have become somewhat more refined, not much else has changed. Instead of crushing a man’s skull with a rock, someone today might use a baseball bat or a hammer. Instead of shooting a man with a musket, the killer might purchase a nine millimeter. Rather than hemlock being the poison of choice, antifreeze is the clear winner since it’s available at a wide selection of retailers.

As technology continues to evolve, so will the ways people commit crimes. What is considered a modern crime today will seem antiquated fifty years from now. If there's a new way to commit an old crime, someone will find it.

August 19, 2015

One of the coolest things about writing about fraud is attending fraud conferences without having to feel like a groupie. The fraud investigators in San Francisco have kindly let me tag along for local events, where forward-looking examiners and investigators can ponder the future of fraud, and more importantly, the future of fraud prevention.

Which leads us to a scary place, I'm afraid.

I heard bankers, investigators, and other professionals say this:

"Everything that can be stolen, will be stolen," and "Everything online can be stolen."

Truly terrifying, no? I resisted online banking, online bill paying for a long time, but now the only checks I write are to the gardener--nope, scratch that, he just went to PayPal.

Of course, the conclusion among professionals was not that we were all doomed to become income streams for invisible Ukrainian cyber-thieves, but rather, that we have got to get better at protecting our resources from online crime. And darn quickly, too.

This easy access to other people's money via the internet got me thinking--what if the next generation grows up not understanding ownership at all? What's the solution to that?

I'm not sure, but I sure hope we get better at protecting people's assets, be they IPs like songs and stories, or cash or Bitcoin, or real property, before a generation grows up thinking possession is 100% of the law.